The present invention relates to electrical cooking appliances and, more particularly, to an electrical appliance that is particularly adapted for quickly, easily, and neatly cooking pancakes, eggs and omelets.
Making pancakes by hand on a hot griddle requires the cook to slip a spatula under the cooking pancake at just the right time and flip the pancake over so that the opposite side is also browned. The same is true for eggs cooked on both sides, and omelets. Flipping the pancake or other item, however, is not as easy as it may seem, and can result in a mess or an unsightly finished product.
The prior art includes clam shell-type cooking devices designed to eliminate the need for flipping the pancake with a spatula. Instead, after batter is poured into the bottom half of the open device and allowed to cook on one side, the cover plate is closed and the entire device is then flipped over for cooking the other side of the pancake on the inverted cover. To remove the pancake, the cooker is held over a plate and opened, allowing the finished pancake to slip out by gravity.
One drawback of such prior art devices is that they require whichever part is doing the cooking to be placed in engagement with an external source of heat such as the heating element of a conventional range or a large hot plate to raise the temperature of the cooking half to a satisfactory level. Thus, in one relatively simple prior design, while the bottom half of the cooker sits on the heating element and cooks the bottom side of the pancake, the cold top half of the cooker remains completely out of contact with the heating element and must be heated up by the element after the device is flipped over, which significantly lengthens overall cooking time. Another design utilizes a large hot plate that straddles two heating elements of the range, or is itself electrically heated, so that the backs of both halves of the open cooker can engage the hotplate at the same time and be simultaneously heated. However, this second design is unwieldy and complicated.
Thus, an object of the present invention is to overcome the deficiencies of the prior art by providing an electrically powered clam shell-type cooker that requires no external heat source of any kind and can therefore be used on virtually any counter top or other surface where electrical power is available for quickly, conveniently, and easily preparing attractive, well-shaped pancakes and other food items such as eggs and omelets without an unsightly mess.
The electrically-powered cooker of the present invention uses a clam shell-type cooking unit having top and bottom pivotally interconnected cooking halves that are each provided with their own internal heating element. When the unit is closed, it may be maintained in a normal position or flipped over into an inverted position. When the unit is open, the two halves can be laid out beside one another with both of their hot plates facing upwardly. In a preferred embodiment, the two separate halves of the cooking unit are pivoted to a common base that sits on the counter or other supporting surface and supports the unit for hinging between its open, upright, and flipped-over positions.
When a pancake is to be cooked, for example, the cooking unit is laid open with the two cooking halves on opposite sides of the hinge axis and their hot plates facing upwardly. Batter is poured onto the hot plate of the bottom half, which is preferably formed into a dished recess to contain and shape the batter into a circle, and the batter is allowed to cook for a period of time. When the bottom side of the pancake is cooked, the top half of the unit with its flat hot plate is rotated about the base and closed on top of the pancake. Then the entire unit is flipped over to the opposite side of the base into an inverted position to correspondingly flip the pancake over, the uncooked side now resting on the hot plate of the inverted top half. The inverted bottom half is then swung back off the pancake to the other side of the base while the uncooked side of the pancake browns. When the pancake is finished, it is removed with a spatula, and the process is repeated.
In a preferred embodiment each cooking surface contains multiple regions for cooking more than one pancake at a time. Furthermore, in a preferred embodiment, a handle formed by two separate handle halves on the two cooking halves of the unit juts out from the cooker at an oblique angle that is most conducive to grasping by the user for flipping the unit and the cooking halves between their various positions. Preferably, the conductor that supplies electrical power to the heating elements of the two cooking halves is totally enclosed within the base and hinge structure of the cooker for safety and cleanliness. A power cord leads from the back of the cooker, while the flip handle projects from the front end of the cooker closest to the user.